Inequality Makes People Hate

A homemade campaign sign supporting Donald Trump in front of an Ohio home on Election Day 2016.CreditCreditTy Wright/Getty Images

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First, “This president has always wanted the election to be about him. And, in these final hours he’s made sure to put the focus back on himself,” writes Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report, in a good state-of-the-midterms piece. Yet that approach may be a gift to Democrats, she explains: Trump’s approval ratings tend to rise when the focus is elsewhere — and fall when it’s on him.

Race, class or both? Since 2016, there has been a raging debate about the main causes of Donald Trump’s shocking victory. On one side are journalists, political scientists and others who believe that racial resentment was the overwhelming reason that Trump won. On the other side are people (including me) who believe this story is too simplistic and that, while race played a big role, economic factors did too.

In a new book, Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post has a chart that reminds me of this debate. The chart contains two lines, the first measuring income inequality and the second measuring political polarization between the two parties in Congress. Both start in 1967 and go until almost the present. And both lines rise sharply, in close proximity: As inequality increases, so does polarization.

Why? The new class of the superwealthy have pushed (mostly Republican) politicians to support ever more extreme policies to protect their wealth, like tax cuts, deregulation and the undermining of labor unions. The result, Pearlstein writes, is “a self-reinforcing dynamic in which concentrations of economic and political power feed off each other.” Democrats, for their part, have responded by opposing many of these pro-wealthy policies.

“But,” Pearlstein explains, “it’s not just the politicians who have been affected. Rising income inequality has also changed the attitudes and behavior of American voters, sowing resentment, fanning prejudice and eroding the sense of shared values, shared purpose and shared destiny that once held the country together.”

One of the groups that’s struggled the most over this period of rising inequality is the white working class. Incomes and wealth have stagnated for many workers, of all races. But while nonwhite workers have benefited from the reduction (but by no means the elimination) of racism during the past half-century, whites have not. This combination helps explain why the recent trends in health and life expectancy are worse for working-class whites than for any other major demographic group.

If anything, it would be surprising if these trends did not affect political views. Sure enough, they seem to have done so. Over the same period that working-class whites have endured stagnation, they have shifted to the right. Many have abandoned the vision that Democrats have long offered — one of “shared values, shared purpose and shared destiny” (to use Pearlstein’s phrase) for the middle class, working class and poor.

Trump turbocharged this shift. He did so by running a campaign that was both more economically populist and more overtly racial than any other recent Republican had. The two themes played off each other, as Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University notes. “Those who try to distinguish between the explanatory power of stagnant wages and a declining industrial base on the one hand, and anxieties about the ascent of minority groups on the other, miss the point,” Cherlin has written. “These are not two different factors but two sides of the same coin.”

The last week has again highlighted that racism is central to Trumpism. His closing campaign message is white nationalism. But his racism has found an audience partly because of the deep economic frustrations that many Americans feel. It’s one of the oldest and saddest themes in history: Frustration breeds bigotry.

More midterms. The tight Senate race in Missouri between Claire McCaskill, the Democratic incumbent, and Josh Hawley, the Republican, hasn’t gotten quite as much attention as some other races. But it’s another important one. It has been the subject of two good recent pieces: Nicholas Lemann profiles McCaskill in The New Yorker; and Joe Nocera of Bloomberg Opinion (building off an episode of The Daily podcast) argues that progressives have madea mistake by criticizing McCaskill’s abortion rhetoric.

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David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt•Facebook